I write the posts with a deliberate voice. It’s a character; an imaginary friend who sees the world with rose-coloured glasses. If you’ve submitted something and we never posted it, there’s a decent chance that it’s because I failed to find the ‘correct’ light-hearted style. We’ve had great success and received a lot of support by sticking with laughter and mockery; straying too far from that into biting sarcastic taunts is something I wish to avoid. So my apologies to those of you who sent without seeing the resulting posts. Those un-posted emails are my own personal failblog.

I wasn’t originally part of FUoS. Oh, sure, I was in the channel when gtz and Jaspir came up with the idea, and I helped out with technical details, but I kept my distance because I didn’t want to intrude on their thing. I have enough things of my own without taking over one of theirs, I thought. And then they made me join up anyway. Hard to believe it’s been a year, but it’s certainly been a fun ride. I want to thank my co-hosts, and I want to thank you the readers, without whom none of this would have been possible.

A year ago, if you had told me that a normal night of shooting the shit with some of my friends would turn into creating a successful site called fat, ugly, or slutty, and that we would be featured on sites like Kotaku and the front page of Reddit, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it did. We did, and it’s been a blast.

I came into the site with the mindset that it would be fun, and our content was funny and if we achieved laughter, all was right with me. In the beginning, I was content with the hilarity factor, but as time went on I started getting more emotionally involved, which is something I have tried so hard NOT to do when it comes to the sensitive issue that is online harassment.

The FUoS project began over a year ago as a stupid joke site by a bunch of sarcastic jackasses with nothing better to do on a weekend except chat on IRC and make fun of people. The domain was purchased, WordPress installed, test post was made, a few social media pieces were later secured and we were “go.”

Kinda makes you think about all those silly ideas you and your friends come up with over a few beers that are like, “Oh man we should TOTALLY do that ahahahaha” (but then usually never do). Everything looks different now. None of us involved have escaped entirely unchanged from our participation in this “joke.” While we keep FUoS fairly de-personalized and not entirely a reflection of ourselves, it would be silly to say that our own feelings, motivations and biases don’t play a part in the final output. We’ve stuck largely to the failblog formula and it has achieved great things in its simplicity. Those achievements have made me hesitant to change anything. However, I (finally) realized it would be a disservice to the project itself to not at least acknowledge what it’s accomplished and meant to us over the past year. FUoS may not be very personalized to the four of us, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for it.

For the next four Wednesdays (starting next week), you will see a retrospective post on what a year of FUoS has meant to one of us. This will be straight-up, no-holds-barred, explicitly personal interpretations of any length and topic the author desires. My hope is that by exposing a little more of who we are and what we bring to the table, we can do right by the project, which is honestly quite a lot bigger than the four of us. Maybe we can give a little insight into what we don’t talk about. Maybe we can provide you with new and interesting ways to evaluate and critique the positive and negative aspects of the project. I haven’t seen all of what everybody’s written yet, so maybe we will accomplish none of that. Maybe it’ll just be weird because some of us probably have different views that could contradict with those of other FUoS staff members. But hopefully it will at least be interesting.

Again, FUoS isn’t about us — but we can’t deny the participation of our various personalities and biases that shape it. And since we’re the ones with the dumb idea and offensive domain name, it’s our responsibility to provide you with this broader view. We hope you’ll enjoy this series, but don’t worry, it won’t interrupt the current post schedule. If you care to join us, we’ll see you for the first entry next Wednesday.

We’re proud to announce that we’ve opened up a partner store at 604Republic (those nice people with geeky t-shirts that you see in our advertising slots). We’re also an affiliate, so if you like any of their otherawesomestuff, please use our affiliate links on the side! It helps pay for our hosting costs. :)

The STUPID t-shirt is a companion piece to the following educational film.

Additionally, we’d like to announce our poetry contest winner: Karissa! Sorry for the delay, but we wanted to pair your prize with this t-shirt announcement. Because… YOU WON A T-SHIRT! See how that works, there?